Lightweight Mask R-CNN for Long-Range Wireless Power Transfer Systems
This is an incremental improvement for wireless power transfer systems, making object detection more feasible on mobile devices.
The paper tackles the problem of applying Mask R-CNN for device detection in Resonant Beam Charging systems by proposing a lightweight version, reducing detection time from 1.02s to 0.613s per image and model size from 245MB to 47.1MB.
Resonant Beam Charging (RBC) is a wireless charging technology which supports multi-watt power transfer over meter-level distance. The features of safety, mobility and simultaneous charging capability enable RBC to charge multiple mobile devices safely at the same time. To detect the devices that need to be charged, a Mask R-CNN based dection model is proposed in previous work. However, considering the constraints of the RBC system, it's not easy to apply Mask R-CNN in lightweight hardware-embedded devices because of its heavy model and huge computation. Thus, we propose a machine learning detection approach which provides a lighter and faster model based on traditional Mask R-CNN. The proposed approach makes the object detection much easier to be transplanted on mobile devices and reduce the burden of hardware computation. By adjusting the structure of the backbone and the head part of Mask R-CNN, we reduce the average detection time from $1.02\mbox{s}$ per image to $0.6132\mbox{s}$, and reduce the model size from $245\mbox{MB}$ to $47.1\mbox{MB}$. The improved model is much more suitable for the application in the RBC system.